skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're not reasonable. Just because someone has a short position doesn't mean you can stake a position deliberately to trigger a squeeze and profit from the result. That's exactly what the GME swarm has been doing.

"Although some short squeezes may occur naturally in the market, a scheme to manipulate the price or availability of stock in order to cause a short squeeze is illegal." - https://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/regsho.htm

I wouldn't be surprised if Robinhood and other brokers' compliance teams made the decision that the penalty for shutting down trading was less than the potential fallout for enabling illegal market manipulation behavior. Just because it's coordinated online between individuals doesn't mean that it's not illegal market manipulation.
nonsense.

the best way to protect this theoretical "bunch of teenagers" would be to block their purchases, but allow buys that are cash in hand.

they did't: they banned all buy orders.

that tells you everything you need to know.
If the tech salaries would become much lower, a lot of people would simply start doing something else, which in turn reduce the pool of candidates. I'm not in a very intense tech job, however it still requires lots of reading, trying to figure out things and some days are nerve wrecking and tense,which often results in headaches,etc. So why do it for low money if I could go and many other jobs that would require additional reading once a year and won't have to sift through stack overflow comments to be able to do my job..
Robinhood has drawn credit lines with banks, tapping several hundred million
Once again, I am a real person. Here is an research article going in depth on retail short selling. https://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/ptetlock/papers/Kelley...
Opportunity cost and time value of money. In general, if person A puts $5K a year into a 401k between ages 25-35 and then stops, while person B puts in $5K a year between ages 35-65, at age 65 person A will have a larger retirement balance despite having put in only 1/3 as much principal. This generalizes to the rest of your net worth (salary+stock) as well.

If you win the lottery and manage to have significant equity in a startup worth millions, congratulations. If not, you're faced with the prospect of being older and having minimal (or at least far fewer) assets. This is a big problem if you want to raise a family or even if you want to advance your status in life.

The economics of software are simply different. Someone good enough to start a business that brings in $10-20K MRR and barely survive is almost certainly good enough to get hired and paid $200K+ by any number of companies. If you're not going big or going home, it doesn't make sense to do a software startup these days.

Even in other industries, starting and running your own business is a LOT of work. If your goal isn't to (try to) get rich, you can almost always make more money climbing some corporate ladder for a lot fewer hours.
Thanks for the link. Some great improvements but there are other issues at hand than just personal identity of the users and remaining anonymous to the system so that advertisers subject them to their propaganda.

People have weaknesses. Being targeted can be abusive to them even if they are adults and anonymous to the system.

An example would be a person with say body dysmorphia and where the advertisers would target the person to have plastic surgeries. That adds fuel to the fire and I have witnessed something to that effect with a person I know. Insecurities that are being harvested for cash and it is not helping anyone.

People can search for what they need themselves. Why do they need to be bombarded with this stuff. Make better visual search engines so people can find what they need when they need it and not before or after.

Unless the advertiser are prevented from using targeting doctrine, it will not stop.
> Most people have still never even heard of Ethereum

This statement was true in 2016, 2018 and 2021. The difference being the momentum - a LOT more people have heard of Ethereum now than back then. I think you might be underestimating the network effect that Ethereum has in the space. All the tooling, beginner-friendly tutorials/books/blogs, institutions and funds flowing into the projects, the sheer number of people working on projects is super impressive.

For anything else to catch up with Ethereum, it's going to take a lot more than "being better technologically". Ethereum currently does have major scaling issues but the community is converging on the "rollups" Layer-2 solutions [1] as a temporary option until it gets added into Eth2. So I suspect the next few months will be a little rough but things like Matic.network or Optimism will start maturing.

[1] https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r...
> but I do worry for people like my dad who can just buy a stock more easily than order dinner.

I can't wrap my head around this argument at all. Why can't you trust your dad about his stock purchases? Yes, someone like your dad can buy a stock easily. They can also lose all their money at a casino or buy a lottery ticket easily. They can spend all their money on gadgets or fancy clothes. They can drink too much alcohol, or gain too much weight. Life comes with risks.

To the extent that a behavior will harm innocent bystanders, then I am fine with making various things illegal, I'm not an anarchist or hard core libertarian or anything. But I don't see how letting someone buy shares of a stock falls into that category of things that could harm innocent bystanders.
The Lay of FPGA Financial Land
RH doesn't know who's buying on margin?

That's also not my problem as a RH user that's not buying on margin.
This is not a margin call and I'm sure it's in the ToS. They sold your stock so the shorts could start their cover.
Webull had to because of Apex, midday they got that sorted out and allowed buying again
Neither of which have ISOs yet.
Because they are on the hook if their customers can't pony up during a margin call. And there are a bunch of teenagers looking at six figure debt when things crash.

Again, this is the difference between a big boy brokerage and a free app. And them providing services they weren't capable of weathering was probably the original sin.
Fair enough. I've immediately liquidated everything in my RH account (I wasn't trading GME or AMC), and I'm waiting to withdraw my funds before I close my account and never touch their app again.

There are plenty of brokers, and web-based brokerages work better than a mobile app for me anyway.
Favourite parasites, Copepods...

Exquisite election, nothing like a Lernaeolophus to appreciate our fine mammalian lifestyle. Nasty Necator, otherwise... yuck.
Well, the far-dated PUT options for GME have almost fully priced in the impending crash at this point. The $320 Jan 2022 PUT price is at $265. I imagine there's still +10% EV at that price, but it's not as compelling as yesterday when it was $240.
well since that's a totally different scenario it's weird that you bring it up in this thread.
It's not a fallacy. It's more like a "logic smell" that means you should look closer to see if the arguer is jumping to conclusions. If they are you should still investigate, e.g. the chain of events they are describing may have actually happened in history or could be related from personal experience. Affording them merit based on that is probably questionable in terms of formal logic, but it might not be unwise.
The open file button doesn't do anything on Safari?
Hi p_l,

I read all the books as they came out, I was a teenager when I read Consider Phlebas, and took everything the culture claimed about itself at face value.

I'm looking forward going back and rereading them, having shifting over time to thinking that the culture may be an unreliable narrator of it's own history and ideology, pacifism is the culture's national mythology equivalent to Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, rather than a statement of fact.

Of course I want to live there.
I own one also (model 3) and regularly make ~400 mile (646 kms) trips at highway speeds and only have to charge for a total of 30 minutes. I usually stop twice to charge the lower end my battery but even if I need to stop once it is 35 minutes.
Robinhood Is Said to Draw on Credit Lines from Banks Amid Tumult
Once again, I am not a shill as you keep posting on my comments. I am a real person and my blog is here - joelx.com. I have an opinion that is different than yours. I have no dog in this game.

Do you hold any positions related the question at hand? Are you trying to pump & dump the stock?
The vast majority know what they are doing here, I took a tiny fraction of my money and bought in - less than I would spend on a family meal out. I assume I lost it but it’s fun to have some skin in the game for the ride. Some people are putting silly amounts in but they know they’re not investing based on market fundamentals, they want in on the ride and they know they can loose it all.

The issue here is the clear protections/options in place for hedge funds that they can use when they feel a squeeze but absolutely no protection for average joe investor when these guys try to short an otherwise viable business going through a rough patch.

GameStop and Blackberry are in the middle of a turn around, shorting them and then telling the market they are failing is unethical and if they feel a bit of pain at the moment then good.
Robinhood is only available in the US.
Huh? Read the linked article. We're discussing what they could mean by "Limited" tomorrow.
It's not really Robinhood's backend, they outsource their order execution to Citadel.
> Gambling isn't even legal in most states. Good luck arguing that.

What States are you not allowed to short or long? Using your logic, this is cognitive dissonance. How free people spend their money is an act of speech, PACs and SuperPACs are emboldened by this current legal fact.
What's the Free Market hypothesis?
I wouldn't have used that exact phrasing, but yeah that is my general premise. "It is obvious" is an argument that might work on Reddit, Discord, Twitter, or HN, but there needs to be some bigger connection for the law to act rather than they did something shady that benefitted someone they have a connection with and that shouldn't be allowed.

It is similar to a lot of the complaints in the wake of 2008. You can't just lock people up for seemingly unethical behavior. You need to find evidence that specific laws were broken. If no laws were broke we need to move on and create new laws to prevent it the next time.
Shares in the US take 3 days to settle. Technically when you buy a share, and it shows up in your account you don’t have actually own it. The broker is only showing you what you expect to receive.

Same for selling a share. Cash from the proceeds will show up in your account, but the broker hasn’t actually received that money from the settlement. You can trade with that cash, only because the broker is extending you credit.

This is why you can’t trade more than once every three days in an IRA. Tax exempt accounts can’t be used as collateral for loans.
Not working with supporters of the deadly insurrection in which people were targeting her is not a mere "difference of political opinion". That's nowhere near the same ballpark.
The part that is "honorable" about the social movement, for me at least, is that the sheer exposure of the shenanigans that wall street carries out, coupled with the challenging of status quo power structures (institutional vs. retail, special accredited status vs. joe on RH), has the potential to lead to general reform and positive changes.

I think you're too quick to defend short selling as purely good, just as everyone else is too quick to decry it as pure evil. There's a middle ground here that's better for everyone, and a public dialectic on the scale we're seeing now is honorable and potentially effective, in my opinion.
>this was a risk-management decision

No it wasn't. It was a reputation management decision and a bad one.
Are you using GNOME? I've never had that happen under Sway and I remember reading many GNOME users' complaints about exactly that.
So, point blank, you believe these restrictions were implemented to protect hedge funds and financial elites?

Do you not believe there could be simpler explanations to brokers halting buying of the meme-stonk tickers that are 1) explained by their own financial incentives and risks, and 2) not by a shadowy conspiracy of financial elites pulling levers behind the scenes?
Is this using https://github.com/futurepress/epub.js/ under the hood?
They do make money off of some people who buy and sell stocks in the form of their Robinhood Gold subscription ($5 a month) and margin (2.5% interest).
Child pornography is illegal, IMO rightly so, and people trading in it should be arrested.

I will never cease to be amused by people who invoke CP to defend censorship when a discussion about control of online discourse is ongoing. We are talking about companies shutting down a group organizing against wall street hedge funds on the pretext that they're Nazi white supremacists, we aren't talking about pedos physically abusing children for profit. If you expect that this is a gotcha and that I have no choice but to declare that I think CP should be protected or else I have to support banning WSB from discord you really need to refine your conversational skills.
DEMOCRATIZING FINANCE

This guy is so out of touch with reality its actually sad to see how money produces willful myopia.
I think they mean ask for forgiveness instead of permission, as the saying goes.
I'm prepared to spoend the first few months studying and catching up for hours after work. I'm just concerned they won't give me enough time to adjust.
Has anyone confirmed this was a margin account? Let's confirm that before supporting the decision.
Twenty-three bed detached house for sale in Gunwharf Quays, Portsmouth PO1
Oh wow, this brings back memories...